Peanut Grower Editor
In what I consider the golden age of great Saturday morning cartoons, when a villain threatened to disrupt peace and harmony on the planet, a call was made to the Hall of Justice and the Super Friends assembled a team to defeat the dastardly plot. Each team member, from Superman to Wonder Woman, had their strengths and weaknesses, and the assembled group would change from one episode to the next. What didn’t change was that the good guys always won, and the Legion of Doom was defeated.
Today’s rendition is Marvel Comics’ Avengers with Iron Man, Captain America and others. They may have different names, purposes, villains and settings, but the principle is the same — the good guys always win in the end.
The peanut industry has our own team of Avengers. At least that’s the way I look at it. When a devastating disease threatens peanut production anywhere in the world, and it is determined that it could affect the U.S. peanut industry in time, a call goes out to our Hall of Justice, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, and a team is assembled to tackle the problem.
That’s what’s happening in the case of peanut smut, a soilborne fungal disease that can now be found in every commercial peanut field in Argentina. As in the case of the Super Friends, each team member has their own special job to do, from plant pathologists and geneticists to research chemists and peanut breeders. Led by Dr. Kelly Chamberlin, the team quickly got to work on various areas of the problem with the goal of developing resistant peanut cultivars.
Although it is taking a little longer than a 30-minute television show or a two-hour movie, the team of researchers is making great progress toward protecting the U.S. peanut industry from peanut smut, should it be needed. You can read more about their work on page 10, and be sure to thank our peanut super heroes for helping protect our industry the next time you see one of them.
